hold me in your standstill ground
by inkfiction
Summary: The word is never spoken but it grows and grows as days and nights merge together to form weeks, months. It grows until it is so huge that sometimes it is the only thing you think about, the only thing you feel.


**Title:** hold me in your standstill ground  
**Fandom:** Once Upon a Time  
**Pairing:** Swan Queen (Emma Swan/Regina — not the mayor)  
**Spoilers/Warning:** Character death. Angst.  
**Summary:** The word is never spoken but it grows and grows as days and nights merge together to form weeks, months. It grows until it is so huge that sometimes it is the only thing you think about, the only thing you feel.  
**Disclaimers:** This is purely fictional. I own none of it.

[…]

_A/N: I'm sorry about this, but I was very sad and depressed today and it just sort of happened. Think of a post-curse world and a relationship based on silence, and the knowledge that it might never reach a happy ending. Think of keeping a secret that makes you ache from the inside, but never daring to speak it out loud. I should stop this note right here._

The word is heavy and omniscient.

It is everywhere.

It hangs in the air between you, crackling with a mute, dull thunder. It floats above your heads like an ominous storm cloud. It flutters in your chest like hope and dies on your tongue like expectations. It hums in every sentence, present under every full-stop and behind every thought. It breathes in your touches, dances on your fingertips, it thrives in your kisses. It is exchanged in your breaths, never uttered, never spoken. It trembles in the tears on your lashes and seeps in your dreams. It flows in your veins and beats in your heart, aches in your soul, coloring the greys and blacks and whites, and leaching out the rainbows.

It is never uttered, never given form.

It is never physically there, but it is never far off. It coils in the air and shivers when you call her your princess. It tangles into the strands of her blond hair along with your fingers and looks out from her green eyes. It lingers in stray touches, and blooms in half-spoken words. It speaks silently in your glances, it screams in the silence that stretches infinitely when you lie in each other's arms late into the morning, quiet, unmoving, awake.

The word is never spoken but it grows and grows as days and nights merge together to form weeks, months. It grows until it is so huge that sometimes it is the only thing you think about, the only thing you feel. It radiates in waves from the two of you, so ever-present. It festers in your hearts, taking root in the fear that never goes away. It leans against the cold, marble slab of fleeting, too-short moments, and waiting to happen disasters, and stares you in the eye, paralyzing your breath on long nights when you kiss her eyelids and wish the word on her forehead. Wish it again and again as she sleeps.

The days grow older and the word grows stronger, wrapped around the two of you, tightening its coils until sometimes you can't even seem to breathe. It remains; warm and liquid in the pit of your stomach, cold and steel-hard in your heart. It is marked in the passing of each of the twelve moons that have so far gone by. The word grows heavier, larger, more poignant with each passing day. It wakes up with you, tired and bloodshot, in the mornings and goes to bed to lie awake and stare at the ceiling.

The word is there in the urgency of her kisses in the later days, and in her strong, almost painful grip on your arms. It burns in her desperate, lingering touches, gathers in the tightening of her arms as they refuse to let you go. It sits on your tongues, heavy in its longing to be spoken. It slides down her cheeks, burning hot, and cooling even as it pools in the hollow beneath her neck. It shakes like the last leaf of autumn in her sobs, and prickles at the base of your neck late on nights when your insomniac heart feels her sleepless gaze fixed on you.

And then one day it trembles in fear like a child as the past comes to visit. It howls with pain as old deals are relived in his scaly green eyes, as the new deals he has made swirl on his taut, iridescent skin, and dance on his foul breath between his rotten teeth. The word stands tall in your straight spine as you try to fight him, and shatters like your resolve as he says 'please', and motions the woman standing behind him forward.

The word is pain and agony, and sorrow. It beats in the red, pulsating glow of the heart that you allowed to be ripped out of your chest by the very woman you swore to yourself would never touch you again, even as your princess screams in the background, pinned to the wall, bound by magic. The word echoes in every scream, helpless, furious, hurting. It falls to the floor with a deafening clang, bangs its head into stone walls as the witch laughs and squeezes, and then it slides inside you on the knife-edge of searing pain that rips you apart from inside out.

It glitters in the dust that trickles out of a black-gloved fist and falls to the floor on which you lie. It seeps out in your tears even as your vision darkens, and rises up as you feel yourself begin to float in the void that engulfs you, and you hear her scream, feel her rush forward, breaking her bonds. The word shakes in the familiar arms that wrap around you, and overwhelms your senses as it slips past her tongue, and yours, finally uttered. Spoken. Free.

And it is the word she says again and again between her sobbing breaths, the word that is your last. With your last, conscious thought you know she will kiss you once, twice, repeatedly, and it will not bring you back, just like it never brought Daniel back, and the word will go wasted into the air just like it did before, leaving her as shattered as once you had been. And the last thing you feel is the heart you no longer have breaking for your princess even as the last of the dust trickles down and you feel no more.

_**~fin~**_

_A/N: I suppose you know what the word is, and I don't need to tell you._


End file.
